The Graving Dock Page 4

  The image of the boy in the box came to mind and his face tightened. He told himself not to get emotional. He had seen many disturbing things in his years with the homicide squad, and he had learned to compartmentalize, to avoid taking these bad images home with him. Otherwise he would never have been able to function.

  Still, memories from the day rose up. The way the boy’s plaid shirt was buttoned so neatly at the neck. Whoever had put him in the box like that had had some sort of feeling for the kid. The child’s face was fixed in Jack’s mind; he had asked the Crime Scene photographer to take a Polaroid that he could use for ID purposes.

  Ideally, he should have been able to look in one central Missing Persons database, but he’d had to scroll through a welter of different lists. There were several national ones, but many places kept their information local, or segregated by branch of service. There were state police databases, sheriff’s lists, and private sites maintained by volunteers…They made for a haphazard, disjointed hodgepodge, and searching through them was a miserable experience. They conveyed more sadness than hope, image after image of lost souls smiling out from baby pictures, graduation photos, wedding albums…

  He had asked a computer tech to scan the Polaroid, and then they had used Photoshop to give the kid open eyes and make him look less grim. They had posted the photos to another type of Web site, ones that law enforcement used to spread images of unidentified bodies. The whole thing was like a gruesome parody of computer dating: people searching for loved ones, cops and coroners hoping to identify the dead.

  Both types of database had been enhanced by a technological development: the science of facial reconstruction. For the missing, forensic anthropologists used computer imaging to guess how people might look after years in limbo. For the unidentified, they created images of what the victims might have looked like before they were reduced to bone. In both cases, there was a grating uncanniness to the images: The missing looked perversely cheerful, while the unidentified tended to look like Neanderthals in some museum of natural history. Both types took a personal toll on Jack Leightner. He couldn’t help wondering what his brother would have looked like if he hadn’t been killed, and he was reminded of the shoddy embalming job his father had been given when he died.

  He closed his eyes. Let it go for now. Steam was building up in the bathroom, and soon a sheen of sweat formed on his face. He leaned back and sighed, finally beginning to relax. This bath thing was a great idea and he wondered why he hadn’t discovered it sooner. He smiled a little: Soon Michelle would probably be getting him into bubble soap and scented candles…

  He thought he heard the front door open, but then realized that it was just one of the old house’s clanking radiators. He knew Michelle was working late, but she had said that she would probably come by.

  His heart lifted when he finally heard her footsteps in the hall. She knocked gently on the bathroom door. “Jack?”

  “Come on in,” he said.

  She entered, sat on the closed toilet seat, and smiled. “You look mighty comfy.”

  “I’m just having a little soak,” he said, as if some sheepishness was called for. He sucked in his gut; he had always prided himself on keeping a trim physique, but between his convalescence and Michelle’s good cooking, he had put on several pounds.

  “Did you eat?” he said. “There’s some leftovers in the fridge—I made dinner for Mister Gardner.”

  “You cooked?” she said, eyebrows raised.

  He shrugged. “I heated. Are you hungry?”

  “I’m fine. We ordered Chinese at the office.”

  “Was it a particularly rough day?”

  “Just busy. Why?”

  He frowned, lying there in the bath. “I don’t know. You look kind of dirty.”

  It took her a second to catch on, and then she grinned. “Let me guess: You know just how to get me clean.”

  He shrugged again, modestly.

  While Michelle took off her work clothes and hung them on the back of the bathroom door, Jack thought of the first time they had made love when he got out of the hospital. He had felt very weak, and would have been satisfied just watching her disrobe, but then she had helped him out of his own clothes. She had climbed up over him, and he raised his head: Through the curtain of her hair, he saw her breasts hanging like lovely fruit over his frail chest. He had squeezed his eyes shut—not in pain, for once, after weeks of pain—but in a strong suffusing pleasure…

  “Hello,” Michelle said now, interrupting his reverie. She looked down between his legs and then gave him a sultry smile. “Who’s your little friend? I mean, your big friend…”

  She lowered herself gingerly into the water and slid down to hook her legs around his. Thank God for roomy old bathtubs. She soaped her hands. He inhaled sharply as she touched him, and then his breath came short and quick. After a minute, he reached out, grabbed her wrists, and pulled her toward him. She gasped as he slid up into her, and he held her there on his lap. She wrapped her arms around him and rested her chin on his shoulder. It felt different to be together in the water like this. It felt damn good.

  Slowly he started to move, rising up into her, breathing hard. She didn’t have her diaphragm in, and he knew they couldn’t do much more without taking a huge risk, but his whole body was full of a powerful sweet light.

  After another minute, he sighed and withdrew. All of that unreleased sexual energy was bound up in a wave of love, and he was tempted to bag his elaborate proposal schemes and just ask her to marry him right then and there.

  She started shampooing her hair, and he noticed that the water was growing cool, and soon such mundane details brought him back to earth. He sat and contemplated her. He felt like he was addicted to her, and it wasn’t just the sex. It was the sound of her key in the lock when she came over, it was the feel of her lower back as he stroked his palm across it just before they fell asleep, it was the pure comfort he could feel just holding her in his arms as they watched some dopey TV show. He wanted these good feelings available all the time. Married. It was a miracle—he had never thought he’d want that again, not after the long, slow decline with his ex-wife, the bickering, the loss of desire, the petty, daily drip of dissatisfaction like a leaky faucet that neither of them could ever quite get around to fixing. After all these years, Michelle had shown him that his heart still worked for something more than just keeping him alive.

  “Do you miss not having kids?” he asked suddenly.

  Michelle went silent. She had been married before, too, but her husband had died of emphysema. She had never bugged Jack about having children, but he had seen a wistful look come over her face when they passed some young family on the street.

  After a moment, she shrugged. “Sometimes. Though I guess it’s not completely too late…”

  Jack nodded cautiously. He already had a son—it was a mark of the seriousness of this new relationship that he was willing to consider the subject again. But first things first: He needed to find out if she would marry him.

  He stood up and reached for a towel. “What are you doing next Saturday?” That was his next day off that coincided with her weekends. If she was free—and if he got the ring back in time—he hoped to give the proposal another shot.

  CHAPTER six

  MICHELLE WILBER FINISHED HER bath with a shower, letting the hot water pound against shoulder muscles tense from a long day of working her office phone. She was still reeling from Jack’s question about kids, but she decided to put off thinking about it until later.

  When she pulled the curtain aside and emerged with a towel piled high on her head, she found him standing next to the sink. He was brushing his teeth, and he turned to her with a frothy grin.

  “Well,” he mumbled, “if it isn’t Cleopatra herself.”

  She turned sideways and stuck her arms out stiffly, like a figure in an Egyptian painting.

  Jack grinned. He was very appreciative of any little humor on her part; she sensed that his first
wife had not exactly been a barrel of laughs.

  He rinsed his teeth and then stared into the open medicine cabinet.

  “Something wrong?” she asked.

  “Did you put the dental floss somewhere? I usually keep it right next to the toothpaste.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just stuck it back in.”

  He seemed to wrestle with himself for a moment, but he couldn’t resist making a comment. “It’s not a big deal, or anything…It’s just that, it’s easier if you keep things in some kind of order. Medicines on one shelf. Dental stuff on another.”

  She had noticed something: When she moved his socks to a new drawer, or even just shifted the location of the kitchen trashcan, he seemed surprisingly put out. Long ago he had set the place up in a way that was comfortable for him. She kidded him about it, but she figured that maybe he needed order at home to counter the terrible disorder he saw in his work (not to mention his chaotic early home life as the child of an alcoholic). Still, he had to concede that most of her changes were for the better. It wasn’t that she was some sort of Suzie Homemaker—she had her own busy career outside the house—but making her surroundings pleasing was deeply important to her. She had an appreciation of life outside the job that he seemed to sorely lack. He loved his work, but she brought him closer to the rest of the world.

  She gave him a wry look, then moved around him to pick up her own toothbrush. “Wanna hear a good joke?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Knock knock.”

  He made a face.

  “Come on,” she said. “Just play along.”

  He crossed his arms. “Who’s there?”

  “Control freak—now you’re supposed to say ‘Control freak who?’ ”

  He got the joke, and laughed, but grew serious again. “Are you saying that I’m a control freak?”

  Michelle smiled. “I’m just teasing. You’re very neat—and very cute.”

  LATER, AFTER THEY HAD gotten into bed and finished what they had started, Michelle could tell by Jack’s breathing that he was drifting away.

  “ ‘Gastrointestinal,’ ” she said suddenly.

  A muffled noise from his pillow. “What?”

  “Your mystery,” she said. “I thought of another possibility.” He had told her about his case, and his guess that the initials on his latest corpse’s forehead stood for the military term General Issue. He had spared her any details about who the victim was; he generally didn’t discuss his work with anyone except a fellow cop.

  She rolled over, thinking. “Or how about ‘glycemic index’? That’s what you check when you have diabetes…” She mused on, enjoying herself. (For him, this was work, but for her it was just a strange new parlor game.) She remembered something she had read about computers. “What about ‘graphic user interface’? No, wait, that would be G.U.I.”

  “ ‘Gary, Indiana,’ ” he said quietly.

  She had to think for a moment. Just as she came up with something, she was disappointed to hear a subtle snore. “ ‘Geographical Institute,’ ” she murmured into the dark.

  She closed her eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. After a few minutes she rolled over and looked at the faintly glowing hands of the alarm clock: It was almost midnight. She lay back carefully, trying not wake Jack, and stared for a while at the dark ceiling, thinking about the way he had raised the subject of kids, and then just as quickly let it drop…It was pretty obvious that he had talked about her childlessness as if it was a done deal.

  In truth, she was close to the final age limit for having kids, but she rarely panicked about it, unlike many single women she knew, and that was because she had mixed feelings about the subject. She liked kids well enough—and loved her little nieces and nephews dearly—but when she saw the harried, sleepless looks of the young mothers she knew, the way that kids seemed to take so much romance out of life, sometimes she wondered if the tradeoffs were worth it. On her infrequent visits to her parents down in suburban Philadelphia, her mother always laid a big guilt trip on her, as if she was abnormal, or—at the very least—selfish and inconsiderate.

  Jack, on the other hand…He already had a son, Ben, a shy, gangly kid in his early twenties. She could understand if he didn’t want to go through diapers and all that baby stuff again, but still—if a major door was going to be closed in her life, she wanted to be the one to shut it.

  CHAPTER seven

  “WE GET SOME FLOATERS,” said Sergeant Mike Pacelli, “but they don’t usually come in boxes.” He hit the starter switch and Jack was glad when the little blue NYPD launch stopped swaying and surged away from the Harbor Unit dock. Black clouds puffed out of the stern, and the smell of salt water was overtaken by a strong odor of diesel fuel. The engine was loud, and the deck rumbled beneath Jack’s feet. Both men fell silent as the boat veered out into New York Harbor, toward the Statue of Liberty.

  Jack shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets. He stood in an enclosed cabin, but the wind on the water brought the temperature way down; he wondered how long it would take for the boat to warm up.

  The launch plowed across the pewter surface. There was a powerful sense of freedom to this mode of transport: While Jack spent half his time struggling through the City’s tangled traffic, this was like driving out across a huge, empty parking lot. You could drive in circles, do figure-eights, whatever you wanted…

  He glanced at his old Academy classmate, calm but authoritative behind the wheel. Pacelli—born and raised on the Jersey shore—had never shown much interest in the City; he was just happy that the five boroughs were largely surrounded by water. He didn’t care that the “Charlie Unit” didn’t even have investigators, as long as he could get paid for working on a boat. Pacelli had a potbelly now, his hair was graying, and his face was weathered by long exposure to sun and wind, but with his dark Ray-Bans and cocky grin it was easy to picture him as a teenager speeding past a beach in a little powerboat, trying to impress some girl.

  Jack smiled back. “This is a pretty sweet detail,” he said, speaking loudly over the noise of the engine.

  Pacelli nodded. “I couldn’t take street patrol. Out here, you don’t have to deal with any of that ‘he-hit-me, no-she-hit-me’ crap.” He paused to listen to a dispatcher’s voice crackling out of the radio mounted next to the wheel, then decided it was something he could ignore. He fell silent for a minute, then turned to Jack with an awkward expression.

  Jack tightened up inside: He knew what the man was about to ask.

  “How are you feeling these days?”

  Jack shrugged, doing his best to act casual. “Fine. Better than the Jets—you see the game last night?” He didn’t like talking about his shooting or recovery. Back in the hospital, he had noticed something strange. Like any wounded cop, he had received many visitors, from the mayor and the commissioner on down. His colleagues would drop by, hand off some magazines or a fruit basket, say they had to run, and run. It took him a while to figure it out: All cops wanted to believe that they were invulnerable, magically protected by the badge. Seeing a wounded coworker put the lie to that belief. Now he just wanted to put the shooting behind him, to blend back in and resume the work he loved.

  He was glad to change the subject. “Tell me about the bodies.”

  Pacelli moved the throttle forward to pick up speed. “We don’t find them much in winter. In the cold weather they tend to sink and stay down, and they don’t come up until the spring.”

  Jack nodded. When the water warmed up, bacteria released gases in the corpses and they rose to the surface, usually around mid-April. It was known as Floater Week. There was a strange poetry to it, all those cold submerged bodies rising up: the drunken boaters, the bridge jumpers, the victims of mob hits (who often escaped their concrete shoes or chains as their bodies softened and frayed). Somebody had once called death “that bourne from which no traveler returns,” but every spring, there they came, not to be denied, all lifting toward the light like watery Pentecostals
on Judgment Day.

  On shore to the right, block after block of huge beige warehouses slid by, the old Brooklyn Army Terminal; it had once processed most of the troops headed off to World War II. Up ahead came the piers and brick warehouses of Red Hook, where Jack was raised. The waterfront there was dominated by a few ship-loading cranes and the huge conical metal silo of the old Revere sugar factory. (At one point the factory had been owned by an associate of Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and Jack knew a local who liked to joke that the abandoned silo was filled with Imelda’s discarded shoes.)

  The bow of the NYPD launch pounded up and down and threw sheets of spray as it encountered an occasional wake. During the summer, the harbor would have been crowded with speedboats, sailboats, even Jet-Skis and kayaks, but there were few vessels out in this chilly weather: mainly ferries and tugs, or tankers just arrived from the ocean, which opened out just beyond the Verrazano Bridge to the south. The ships rested on the water like majestic animals on some African plain.

  “Is this the end of the season for private boats?”

  Pacelli nodded. “Pretty much. By mid-January most people take their craft out of the water, because we start to get ice out here.”

  Jack stared out the broad windows of the cabin. If the coffin had not been unloaded from some small boat, it had probably been launched from shore. Where was the question—if he knew that, he would know where to look for witnesses.

  Pacelli turned away from his constant scanning of the water ahead. “Have you gotten a preliminary report from the M.E. yet?”

  Jack nodded. “It seems that the kid was poisoned, by injection.”

  Pacelli got a little wide-eyed. “Do you think it could be a terrorist thing? Like this goddamn anthrax that’s going around?”